Kelly Clarkson, the former American Idol star turned My Life Would Suck Without You hitmaker, has performed Whitesnake's hair metal classic Here I Go Again on her popular daytime TV show, the eponymously titled Kelly Clarkson Show.
The performance was part of the show's long-running “Kellyoke” segment, in which Clarkson performs two-minute covers of famous songs requested by members of the TV audience with her band Y’all. Previous recipients of the Kellyoke treatment include Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees, Blink-182's All The Small Things and Come Out And Play (Keep ‘Em Separated) by The Offspring.
"You can join us on stage any time, Kelly Clarkson!" commented The Offspring in the wake of Clarkson's performance of their pop-punk classic.
At the time of writing, Whitesnake's David Coverdale had not publicly congratulated Clarkson on her cover.
Originally a single from Whitesnake's Saints & Sinners album, Here I Go Again reached No. 34 in the UK in 1982. A revised recording on the band's 1987 album five years later became the band’s first American chart-topper, its passage to the top of the chart eased by an MTV-friendly video which found Coverdale's future wife Tawny Kitaen cavorting atop a white Jaguar XJ.
The song has long been considered a classic, although it's not always been used in the most uplifting of circumstances. In 2015, freed Guantanamo Bay detention centre prisoner Shaker Aamer revealed how his captors had played Here I Go Again as part of a noise torture tactic which involved playing loud music and white noise. But instead of breaking him down, Aamar reported that the song gave him hope.
“I used to sing it a lot, because the words," said Aamar. "I thought the words fitted me. The words makes me feel like, yeah, it’s me again. ‘Like a drifter I was born to walk alone, ‘cause I know what it means to walk alone the lonely street of dreams.’"
